Welcome to Early Access Update 24. The majority of this update is dedicated to the Beta build, but the default branch also gets a bit of love and attention.
First up, changelog.
- Fix: Sound FX Memory Stream had a misaligned pointer on reset.
- Fix: Level 5 Monster Boss, Lula The Non-Resident Alien, was physically failing to load, and spawned only as an invisible collision box, making hitting her a little difficult.
- Fix: Message box for "Game Over" or "World Complete" has been resized better for new text.
- Change: Moved level 6 swag spawn positions slightly more down into terrain.
- Fix: Added "allowPlayerStep" to node objects incase of rare collision issue related to above change in level 6.
- Fix: Momento Mori timer was not displaying countdown due to trying to include minutes, making string too large for display.
- Fix: Player clock was not displaying hours played.
- Change: Altered font size for clock to better fit.
- Change: Altered vertical size and position on clock.
- Fix: Fixed corruption in datablock cache called by changing pack/unpack in cpp.
- Change: Altered values for default level of detail distances to improve performance.
I had spent a good amount of time using the engine's own network debugging systems, but found that they weren't actually operating as I had expected. Whilst they tracked packets et al, they didn't give me the information which I had hoped for. PacketData disagreements happened when expected, with objects spawning on the server and then being transmited to the now behind client. However the Net Move Checksums would complain everytime there was an object that wasn't initialized at the birth of the server, eg: whenever the player moved the change in position for each object created AFTER the level had loaded would spam the debugger ... which was not terribly useful ... ːsteamfacepalmː
The good news is that packets were not getting dropped, the bad news was I ended up with a gigantic debugging file of limited value. I also ended up introducing an unitialized variable to my local datablock cache object which produced a bug with particle animated bitmaps, and took a good 3 days to hunt down and fix.
Anyhow, Happy New Space Year 2024. ːhappychappyː